Constantine S01E01 – Review

This review comes nearly too late, to the point that I was of half a mind to just forget the whole thing altogether, but having already started, it seems a waste to let it all go. To be honest, I was even more tempted to abandon the review after watching the episode. To be even more honest, I thought about not even watching the episode in the first place, sparing me the pain of having to write about it. Are you sensing a little prejudice here? ‘Cause there totally is.

Not that I have anything against John Constantine, although he’s not one of my favorites, but I just have an unshakeable feeling that trying to adapt him to primetime is a doomed venture. It was Vertigo, a mature imprint, that made the character compelling, and it didn’t do it by softening him up for a wider audience. The John of Hellblazer is a pretty twisted, manipulative bastard who gets up to some pretty dark stuff, so how a network that can’t even bear to portray smoking on television hopes to capture that John is completely beyond me.

The only John that can possibly work on NBC is one closer to the scrubbed-up version in the mainstream DCU, and that’s exactly the one we get. The John who enters himself into an insane asylum is not only openly remorseful for his actions; he’s actually emotional about them, getting pissed at the therapist who neglects to mention the name of the girl he damned to Hell. Those may be actual tears held back in his eyes as he grinds out, “It’s her damnation that’s eating me alive—dragged to hell, nine years old and suffering for all eternity.” He wears that self-loathing (and anxiety over his own doomed soul) on his trenchcoat sleeve throughout the pilot, and it brings him that much closer to your conventional hero.

Overall though, Constantine is your conventional supernatural drama, something you’d expect to see on the CW rather than NBC. In fact, the whole look and feel of the pilot is very much Supernatural, all blue tones, heaven and hell, and creepy special effects. About the only distinguishing feature of Constantine is the greater use of magic, which is of your typical Latin-esque mumbo-jumbo and fancy symbols variety. In other words, it works and fails when the story needs it to, rather than by clear rules.

So even without looking at the issue through the eyes of a Constantine fan, there are problems, but they’re of the kind that can be worked out as the show evolves. We have good reason to believe it will, as the end of the episode sees the departure of one of its weakest parts, Liv Aberdine, John’s not-disciple. Inoffensively hapless, neither likable nor unlikable, she exists solely to give John someone to briskly show the ropes to. Hopefully, her replacement can serve as a listening ear and actual foil to John, which requires far more personality than Liv can probably ever generate.

Because for all of his shortcomings in characterization, John is a big personality. With more lines than almost all the other cast members combined (even Harold Perrineau as the good-humored angel, Manny), Matt Ryan has a lot of opportunity to show that he doesn’t just look the part—which he uncannily does—he can grasp that vaguely hapless charm at the center of that oily accent and shrugging demeanor. Ryan’s not helped by the script, which veers towards the loud and pushy (“Wait! What’s on the way?!” screams John skyward after the vanished Manny), but he does what he can to keep it marginally credible.

-Minhquan Nguyen